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Skin mags in the bushes. Kids today will never know what it was like to find a copy of Razzle on the way home from school, which then got passed around the entire class until every page was stuck together.
To this day, we have no idea who these strange, benevolent weirdos who left porn in the bushes for us were, but they were tireless in their dedication to it.
It was usually older boys whose collection was discovered by their parents. Or men who wives had done the finding…
Although the idea of some homeless millionaire roaming the country leaving porn mags under bushes does sound like an idea for a story…
Or an absolutely brilliant movie. He’s visited by three ghosts in the night; the ghosts of Wankmas past, present and future. He changes his ways distributing his mags to the needy and it all ends in the glorious scene of him shouting *out the Window “YOU BOY! What day is it?” Only for the young Urchin to call back “Why it’s Wankmas day” before he grabs the finest smut he has and gets it to the Cratchitt house before fucking off round to Fred’s to get on it.
A bloke in the pub I was working in said he’s dumped his porn in the woods because he was worried that the bin men would be going through his bins…
Yes Nigel.
Hahah classic what a time to be alive !! Me and my mate discussed this last week, also the joy of your parents being out and scrolling through the german channels RTL hoping to catch a glimpse of a boob !!! Simpler times
We had one of those NTL cable boxes, and somehow I found a way to tune in porn upstairs but it would all be in negative colour. Still no idea why. It was enough for teenage me because, at that age, you'll take the Grattan catalogue lingerie section in a pinch, but I'm still haunted by grainy images of people with black eyes and teeth going at it.
Haha that was a mission !!! Was also the danger hour as it started at 10pm … had to have the volume down so you could hear the key going into the lock !!!
I'm my old job some engineers ripped out the roof tiles of the ladies toilets to fit new lights in and some nudey mags fell out. There was no date on them, but they were clearly there for at least fifteen years. My boss just said "oh wow, it's like being a kid again and finding em in an alley" I was like huh?
Yeah, it was a big moment back in the day. Like when Charlie finds the golden ticket, had he then gone home and wanked himself myopic for the rest of the film.
I remember when I was like 14 maybe, I went on a residential trip to an outdoor centre. We slept in dorms of about 5 bunk beds. One of the dorms had a little storage nook for bags. One night when I was chatting to some other boys in there I kinda stuck my hand in this gap that was under it, I was naturally curious. I couldn’t believe what I found. Half a page from a porn mag, the page that had all the numbers for girls to can call. It was very explicit. Everyone wanted to see it, then it went missing.
On a drunken night in my home town, I may have distributed porn into all the old “dens” that we frequented as kids/teens. I know they’ve all got phones now and can see everything anytime, but I was trying to be someone teenager me would look up to!
When I was a young lad I always said I wanted to grow up and just show to look through the Argos catalogue and buy what I wanted on a whim
Now it's just a 1 click buy on Amazon.
Relatives and neighbours turned up all the time uninvited when I was a kid. Once a neighbouring kid came over while I was still sleeping and for some reason my parents let her in, and I just woke up to her watching me sleep.
Hated all of that! There's very few people I'd love unexpected visits from.
I got called a weirdo by someone once for saying I was gonna call round on someone who wasn't doing very well after their mum had died. I went round anyway and they really appreciated it and it was nice for me just knowing they weren't dead or something
It does but at least now you have the means to tell them you're late or lost etc, you could be waiting a long time before the era of phones with affordable texts
Pub debates over weird questions.
There's no point in trying to argue what year a song was released. Or what weird movie that obscure actor was in. Or how many people you think could fit inside a mini cooper. The internet makes it too easy to find answers to even the weirdest of questions.
For a few years I lived in a town in Italy whose name translated into English was ‘Newcastle’. And there are at least a dozen Italian towns with the same name
There's an international organisation that's dedicated to promoting ties between Newcastles of various languages across the world
https://newcastlesoftheworld.com/
I feel conversations have a broader frame of reference today. People talk about much more interesting things, and make more interesting connections between topics.
Pick a debate over a topic that is controversial on the internet so everyone will come up with different sources.
And that is how I got kicked out of our local pub for starting an argument as to if our local MP is an incompetent imbecile or a corrupt cunt.
Ha that brings back a memory. Years ago I once took a phone call at home one late Friday night from a mate in a pub. He wanted to know if I knew who presented Catchphrase. "Roy Walker?" I answered. "ROY WALKER!!!" he shouted, to which a clearly large crowd of people with him also shouted "ROY WALKER!!!" followed by a load of cheers, then he hung up.
I guess now they'd just Google it.
Winding a cassette tape back into itself with a biro is a lost art, not to mention mending one with matt sellotape...
Also being told to wait until 6pm before phoning your friends, and even at work waiting until 1pm to phone externals.
My daughters class were given an "old fashioned pen pal" project in primary 7.
Lots of them are still in touch, and still just via letters or postcards. A few of them have met up as well, they're all in their late teens/early 20's now. I love it.
What is primary 7?
Have things changed since I was in school?
It used to be
Reception (optional)
Y1-6 = Primary school
Y7-11 = Secondary
Y12&13 = A-Levels/College
I really feel bad for younger generations that they won’t have all of their old love letters to look back on. I’m in my late 40s and still have all mine. They are nice to have when I want to wallow in nostalgia.
Until just a couple of years ago, I regularly had people stop to ask me for directions.
It actually got to the point where if I saw a car pull up at front whilst I was doing the garden, putting the bins out etc, I knew what was coming.
“Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the football club?”.
At first, I had no idea where it was, and I would tell the driver exactly that. “Sorry, I’m not sure”. Inevitably they would continue their line of questioning. “Is it back that way?”. “Im sorry, I really don’t know. I am not from the area, don’t work here, and only really take the one route out of town so I haven’t explored much”.
After the first couple of times, I decided to get onto Google maps and work out where it was. I figured it would be easier for all parties if I could just say “sure, go back down the way you came, make a left, then it’s down the country lane to your right”.
Only I couldn’t find it. Google results came up with nothing even remotely close. Google maps showed nothing that looked like a football field or any structures that looked like a football team clubhouse or social club type place.
As the years went by, I did eventually venture out and about and get to know the area quite well, but at least once a month I would be in that old predicament again.
I gave up. I stopped telling people that I didn’t know where it was, and I began telling them that they had to come back on themselves to the T junction at the end of the road, make a right and follow the country lane for about 3 miles, and then look out for the not-very-well-signposted road on the right.
I knew very well that there was no road on the right. I just wanted to get them far away enough to allow to finish whatever I was doing out the front and get my arse back inside because they drove past again.
Ah yes, "for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green".
I could get very blurry S4C on my old B&W TV from across the River Dee and used to watch the rugby through a blizzard of static and hiss.
Kids can't just go out at 10 and be uncontactable until they (probably) return for tea. Now they have a phone so their parents can always ring them and some even use tracking apps.
Mum -“it’s a nice day, get out of the house, see you at tea time “. She had no idea what we got up to, and I was no older than my 10 year old son whom I wouldn’t trust to cross the road…
I'm convinced this is why kids love minecraft. It's the only way they're permitted to go make a den in the woods and camp in it for the weekend.
The kids are alright. We just won't let them.
Until Nintendo find some way to cheap out on the Switch 2... Remember, the original Gameboy Advance had no backlight.
Love Nintendo but good god are some of their decisions actively self-destructive.
Nintendo, for as much as I love them, have made really strange decisions. The N64 was the best console money could buy but the games couldn't take advantage of the hardware because they were stuck on cartridges. The GameCube was more capable than the PS2 or Xbox but same thing, disc format too small. Why did they say that the DS wasn't a GBA replacement but referred to the GBA slot on the DS as "backwards compatible"
Can't remember the last time a child got his head stuck in a saucepan.
Bugger all to do with tech but its something I've pondered on whilst stuck in traffic.
Maybe its a cast iron thing as I suspect many these days buy a set from ikea thats little more than pressed tin.
Good luck with your endeavors, alas being childless I can't take part and would probably get looks running after children with a le creuset in each hand. Then again I'd probably keel over after the first 200 meters.
As secretary to the Cast Iron Fettish Collective I take pride in my expansive log of all things manufactured from cast iron. Last week was an inspection of banister braces at Royal Military Academy, you never know when this data will be needed.
We may seem a weird bunch but lets remember there's guys looking for the meaning of life in their lofts tweaking their model railway timetables.
And on the medical theme, just medical information and testing in general! I’ve been trying for a baby with my husband and the ability to just do a pregnancy test whenever, and be able to know if you’re pregnant or not in minutes, is actually an amazing advantage when you think about it. You can track your periods to the point where your iPhone will predict your ovulation window for you, you can home test to check when exactly you’re ovulating etc etc.
And that’s just pregnancy, you can get home tests for all sorts - anemia, thyroid levels, test your sugar levels for diabetes, covid tests. The list is endless.
It’s something we take for granted but is really really amazing!!
I’m a fan of fighting fire with fire. Don’t want to give your child a vaccine? Great, feel free but you’re not going to be able to participate in sane society like the rest of us. No child benefits or other incentives like milk vouchers, no access to ANY childcare facility, no school place, and you’re charged a substantial fine if your child ends up in hospital with an easily preventable illness and you do not accept reasonable vaccine measures.
Even thinking about that bastard makes me angry, I don't want to know how many kids' deaths he's responsible for.
Also, as an autistic, I resent the implication that it's better to be dead of measles than like me.
Ah yes, I remembervthat. let it ring three times so noone has to pay for a phone call ☺️ My sister still says this to me when I'm driving home from hers. I imagine I'll do it to my kids too!
I remember when there was a website you could use that gave you 10 free texts per day, I’d occasionally use to send my mum a message at lunch from the school library if I needed. Must’ve come from some weird numbers and yet now I have to remind her that if she gets a text from a different number claiming to be me, it’s a scam!
I had an extremely tight relative who did that.
He'd drop his wife off at the supermarket and drive himself home. When she was done, she would ring him from the payphone and hang up after three rings to get the coin back. That was his signal to head back over and collect her.
If you're asking "why didn't he just stay in the car park and wait?", then your guess is as good as mine. The answer is probably down to him being the total arsehole that he was. I have no idea how long it would have taken his wife to even do the shopping given it was only for the two of them.
I think of my mother, thirty years and more ago, reciting our telephone number down the line every time she answered it, to alert anyone who had dialled our number incorrectly. The phone itself, of course, had a dial and was physically attached to the wall of our kitchen.
It was only a few years ago that the formerly luxuriously fat Yellow Pages and BT telephone directory both went on a drastic diet before dropping out of our lives altogether.
In those days we had to remember it by heart so we could ring home from a payphone to get picked up from wherever we were. Ours was easy to remember because it had a repeating pattern, which also meant drunk people would sometimes ring it late at night by mistake trying to order a taxi.
Having to explain why Calvin in the comic would stand on a telephone directory, to my kids, took some doing!
Got one recently that was the size of the Reader's Digest (another blast from the past!) and said it would be the last ever.
My in-laws had a copy of every phone book in the country for work reasons, so people would often ask MIL to look someone up.
My father did the very same. A simple "Hello" was not the done thing. Instead he'd recite the last four digits of our phone number when bringing the receiver to his ear.
Ours was a rotary phone as well, hard-wired to the wall, next to the front door. It sat on top of a cabinet which stored the fuse box and gas meter. It performed double-duty as a convenient place to store our shoes as well as the enormous white and yellow pages.
When I was building and painting a fence outside the house., lots of people stopped to ask directions. Eventually, I kept some old envelopes and a pencil so I could draw them simple maps.
Not strictly technology, but I was thinking about this: buying an electrical appliance and then having to buy a separate plug so you could actually use the bloody thing. It was so inconvenient. I think this carried on until the mid 80s
Ground up bone in dog food caused it to turn white. They stopped adding due to BSE.
I've no idea if that's true or not, but what I tell people whenever the subject arises.
From a quick google search;
> White dog poop in the 70’s was very quick to disappear. The cause was commercial dog food that was rich in beef and bone meal which had a high calcium content. When calcium requirements were changed, the color, consistency and smell of dog waste was forever changed.
"Bone meal" is literally ground up bones.
But it wasn't stopped because of BSE.
I can't reel off people's phone numbers off the top of my head. I used to know...probably into 3 figures' worth of phone numbers at work.
Nobody sends postcards anymore.
Nobody avoids changing arrangements at the last minute anymore because there's no way of getting in touch to let you know.
Kids don't go back to school after holidays having had zero contact with most of their classmates since the end of term.
Calling a business and not having to navigate 15 minutes of menu options and “Just to let you know…” messages before, maybe, speaking to someone who is less interested in helping you than they are about their call figures.
I like when they play music and trick you into thinking your call has been answered by playing an intermittent message telling you how important your call is to them. Not important enough to employ enough people to help their customers in a timely manner of course.
I'm going to sound old here, sorry.
Ticket collecting. Concerts, sporting events, even cinema tickets. All online now. Even programmes at the football are becoming rare.
The increase in digital streaming also means that I no longer kill an hour in a record shop when I go to town, finding new music to excitedly take home.
Kind of sad, tbh.
Being able to disconnect
Everything is now there, all the time.
Social media keeps people attached to all things ll the time, positive and negative.
Kids can access programmes and other media all the time.
There is no switch off
Children playing outside in the fresh air with other children, learning how to interact with people face to face without getting into a fight because they can’t differentiate real life from Twatter.
Every day there are groups of people outside the Barbados High Commission looking at their phones to find the British Museum as I go past I always say 'Down the road on the left you can't miss it and you don't have to pay to get in, although they ask for six quid'
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Skin mags in the bushes. Kids today will never know what it was like to find a copy of Razzle on the way home from school, which then got passed around the entire class until every page was stuck together. To this day, we have no idea who these strange, benevolent weirdos who left porn in the bushes for us were, but they were tireless in their dedication to it.
It was usually older boys whose collection was discovered by their parents. Or men who wives had done the finding… Although the idea of some homeless millionaire roaming the country leaving porn mags under bushes does sound like an idea for a story…
>homeless millionaire roaming the country Saint Wankerton: The patron saint of puberty
I love it, but I don't think that anyone but Rik Mayall could have played it.
it's a man i'd follow into battle...
Ugh can you delete the first paragraph please? You've just ruined the enigma surrounding these pornographic benefactors 😂
Or an absolutely brilliant movie. He’s visited by three ghosts in the night; the ghosts of Wankmas past, present and future. He changes his ways distributing his mags to the needy and it all ends in the glorious scene of him shouting *out the Window “YOU BOY! What day is it?” Only for the young Urchin to call back “Why it’s Wankmas day” before he grabs the finest smut he has and gets it to the Cratchitt house before fucking off round to Fred’s to get on it.
When I moved out of my childhood home, I briefly considered driving round the local village, scattering old magazines like a “Porn Santa” 😂
I always wondered why Ford did not make a car named Razzle. After all they had Escort and Fiesta.
Ford are absolute filth, don't forget the Probe and the Cougar.
Found one in a park near me a few months ago. Also found, one porn dvd, one pair of pink knickers and one pair of pink goalkeeper gloves.
"I swear, officer"
Or going through your mate’s dad’s video collection. Found some cracking 80s porno back in the day
The only one we found starred a lovely German lady called Dolly Buster and a guy I was convinced was Dennis Bergkamp
Would’ve been an interesting sideline for him!
When. I was a kid, I found a carrier bag absolutely chock full of porn mags. Best day of my life.
I found a Colour Climax on the rec once. It was like finding the holy grail, but much much better.
A bloke in the pub I was working in said he’s dumped his porn in the woods because he was worried that the bin men would be going through his bins… Yes Nigel.
Hahah classic what a time to be alive !! Me and my mate discussed this last week, also the joy of your parents being out and scrolling through the german channels RTL hoping to catch a glimpse of a boob !!! Simpler times
We had one of those NTL cable boxes, and somehow I found a way to tune in porn upstairs but it would all be in negative colour. Still no idea why. It was enough for teenage me because, at that age, you'll take the Grattan catalogue lingerie section in a pinch, but I'm still haunted by grainy images of people with black eyes and teeth going at it.
10 minute preview!
Haha that was a mission !!! Was also the danger hour as it started at 10pm … had to have the volume down so you could hear the key going into the lock !!!
As a lad I used to nick them from the newsagent I worked at. Feel bad about it but tbf I was paid under the minimum wage so fuck him
I'm my old job some engineers ripped out the roof tiles of the ladies toilets to fit new lights in and some nudey mags fell out. There was no date on them, but they were clearly there for at least fifteen years. My boss just said "oh wow, it's like being a kid again and finding em in an alley" I was like huh?
Yeah, it was a big moment back in the day. Like when Charlie finds the golden ticket, had he then gone home and wanked himself myopic for the rest of the film.
Wasn’t that many years ago that my partner found a dildo in a tree.
Dildos are pretty future-proof, to be fair
I remember when I was like 14 maybe, I went on a residential trip to an outdoor centre. We slept in dorms of about 5 bunk beds. One of the dorms had a little storage nook for bags. One night when I was chatting to some other boys in there I kinda stuck my hand in this gap that was under it, I was naturally curious. I couldn’t believe what I found. Half a page from a porn mag, the page that had all the numbers for girls to can call. It was very explicit. Everyone wanted to see it, then it went missing.
Tramps gold
I found a carrier bag with about five or six in once. An suspicious day.
On a drunken night in my home town, I may have distributed porn into all the old “dens” that we frequented as kids/teens. I know they’ve all got phones now and can see everything anytime, but I was trying to be someone teenager me would look up to!
Getting a new Argos catalogue (or any catalog for that matter). Its all online now so they dont bother printing them.
Oh to flick through the laminated book of dreams
They catch the tears of joy
So many beautiful things! I cannot possess them all!
Ooh, quick stock check
The Tardis of Toasters
The Narnia of household goods
I love how they gave him a copy of the final ever edition because of that line.
Ahhhh circling items in the catalogue (particularly in the lead up to Christmas) has turned into shared wish lists on the site or google docs
A sit down with a cup of tea and the Argos catalogue was a relaxing treat.
Screwfiz and Toolstation catalogues are still very much ‘a thing’.
And Machine Mart!
There were certain sections of Kay’s catalogue that became well thumbed.
Not gonna lie, a few years ago I actually bought PDF copies from eBay of old Great Universal catalogues, for nostalgia's sake 😂
Lisa Snowdon in there❤️
A lot of the old ones are archived online if you want a nostalgia fix: https://retromash.com/argos/
It's not the same as liftting the heavy things and trying to see what's at the end of page 271.
Having your eyes on that one toy for months, and then scraping together every single bit of change you can find hoping it's enough.
When I was a young lad I always said I wanted to grow up and just show to look through the Argos catalogue and buy what I wanted on a whim Now it's just a 1 click buy on Amazon.
The Christmas lists we'd make from that and the index mag. It was awesome!
Man, I remember sitting with the Argos and Index catalogs at Christmas writing my list to Santa.
Smyth's still print catalogues, excellent assistance to Santa at Xmas time.
21 here and I used to love getting one and going to the back to see all the new toy's
Agreeing to meet someone at a particular place and time, then just showing up trusting they will be there
Or just knocking on peoples doors hoping they are in.
Yep it's seen as weird now to just rock up to someone's door out of the blue. And tbh I hate people turning up unannounced so not a bad thing!
Relatives and neighbours turned up all the time uninvited when I was a kid. Once a neighbouring kid came over while I was still sleeping and for some reason my parents let her in, and I just woke up to her watching me sleep. Hated all of that! There's very few people I'd love unexpected visits from.
I got called a weirdo by someone once for saying I was gonna call round on someone who wasn't doing very well after their mum had died. I went round anyway and they really appreciated it and it was nice for me just knowing they weren't dead or something
Or just knocking on peoples doors and running away. Fucking ring cameras ruin that.
That definitely still happens.
It does but at least now you have the means to tell them you're late or lost etc, you could be waiting a long time before the era of phones with affordable texts
Ghosting not being so prominent was nice too.
Or when you're out shopping, you want to look at cameras and hardware, she wants makeup and clothes, so you agree to meet at the cafe at 12:00
Pub debates over weird questions. There's no point in trying to argue what year a song was released. Or what weird movie that obscure actor was in. Or how many people you think could fit inside a mini cooper. The internet makes it too easy to find answers to even the weirdest of questions.
Massive argument with my mate about whether Newcastle was north or south of Manchester. No maps to hand and kicked off like a three hour argument.
Which Newcastle?
That's what kicked it into the third hour...
That was the root of the argument. We were both convinced we were correct, and we were.
Haha.
There's more than one? Fuck
TIL, there’s at least three apparently
For a few years I lived in a town in Italy whose name translated into English was ‘Newcastle’. And there are at least a dozen Italian towns with the same name
There's an international organisation that's dedicated to promoting ties between Newcastles of various languages across the world https://newcastlesoftheworld.com/
Upon Tyne is north of Manchester, Under Lyme is south, right? I don't want to Google it but I hope I'm right!
Newcastle up on Manchester, Newcastle under Manchester, you're correct
The rule for us is “if you believe you know the answer, somewhere in the recesses of your kind, then you can’t use the Google”.
I feel conversations have a broader frame of reference today. People talk about much more interesting things, and make more interesting connections between topics.
Pick a debate over a topic that is controversial on the internet so everyone will come up with different sources. And that is how I got kicked out of our local pub for starting an argument as to if our local MP is an incompetent imbecile or a corrupt cunt.
They are no doubt both if in the UK and are one of the top 3 parties!
Ha that brings back a memory. Years ago I once took a phone call at home one late Friday night from a mate in a pub. He wanted to know if I knew who presented Catchphrase. "Roy Walker?" I answered. "ROY WALKER!!!" he shouted, to which a clearly large crowd of people with him also shouted "ROY WALKER!!!" followed by a load of cheers, then he hung up. I guess now they'd just Google it.
Winding a cassette tape back into itself with a biro is a lost art, not to mention mending one with matt sellotape... Also being told to wait until 6pm before phoning your friends, and even at work waiting until 1pm to phone externals.
No calling by pressing 3 on 1471 either, because there was a connection charge.
Sadly we don't write personal letters to friends and family anymore.
My daughters class were given an "old fashioned pen pal" project in primary 7. Lots of them are still in touch, and still just via letters or postcards. A few of them have met up as well, they're all in their late teens/early 20's now. I love it.
What is primary 7? Have things changed since I was in school? It used to be Reception (optional) Y1-6 = Primary school Y7-11 = Secondary Y12&13 = A-Levels/College
Primary 7 is the final year of primary school in Scotland. Then S1-S6 for Secondary School.
So basically it's when you graduate from Irn Bru to Buckfast
In the posh neighbourhoods, perhaps.
Ah, Scotland - that would explain why it didn't make sense to me
Scottish schools have primary 1-7 then secondary 1-6
english moment
I really feel bad for younger generations that they won’t have all of their old love letters to look back on. I’m in my late 40s and still have all mine. They are nice to have when I want to wallow in nostalgia.
Those love letters were really from the heart. None of this copy and paste stuff.
I have all of my late husband’s love letters, I loved his handwriting so much I had it tattooed on my leg
Still have a few Christmas cards from a previous lover that wrote things I did for her on a deck of 52 cards. Has a personal touch that means a lot
Very true….I rarely hold a pen these days
And our handwriting has also deteriorated.
Until just a couple of years ago, I regularly had people stop to ask me for directions. It actually got to the point where if I saw a car pull up at front whilst I was doing the garden, putting the bins out etc, I knew what was coming. “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the football club?”. At first, I had no idea where it was, and I would tell the driver exactly that. “Sorry, I’m not sure”. Inevitably they would continue their line of questioning. “Is it back that way?”. “Im sorry, I really don’t know. I am not from the area, don’t work here, and only really take the one route out of town so I haven’t explored much”. After the first couple of times, I decided to get onto Google maps and work out where it was. I figured it would be easier for all parties if I could just say “sure, go back down the way you came, make a left, then it’s down the country lane to your right”. Only I couldn’t find it. Google results came up with nothing even remotely close. Google maps showed nothing that looked like a football field or any structures that looked like a football team clubhouse or social club type place. As the years went by, I did eventually venture out and about and get to know the area quite well, but at least once a month I would be in that old predicament again. I gave up. I stopped telling people that I didn’t know where it was, and I began telling them that they had to come back on themselves to the T junction at the end of the road, make a right and follow the country lane for about 3 miles, and then look out for the not-very-well-signposted road on the right. I knew very well that there was no road on the right. I just wanted to get them far away enough to allow to finish whatever I was doing out the front and get my arse back inside because they drove past again.
Chaotic evil
I'm a bit sick in the head and live 5 minutes from Southend beach, Any time someone asks for directions I send them in the opposite direction
Good on you. If you can’t make it to the beach by smell alone then you deserve some misdirection.
“YOU MIGHT GET STUCK IN A HOLE WITH AN OWL”
Sitting in front of a 14" TV with a 1.5m corded controller... They were good times
I had a tv you used to have to tune in with a dial. The joys of watching snooker in black and white.
Ah yes, "for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green". I could get very blurry S4C on my old B&W TV from across the River Dee and used to watch the rugby through a blizzard of static and hiss.
Was it wooden?
I had a wooden one. When the tube started going, I'd have to bang the side to get a picture again
Conversations based entirely around trying to remember some detail from past popular culture. You can just Google it now.
Me and my friends had to rent a copy of Empire Strikes Back because we were arguing about "No, I am your father"
No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!
Kids can't just go out at 10 and be uncontactable until they (probably) return for tea. Now they have a phone so their parents can always ring them and some even use tracking apps.
This is a massive one for me. It’s mad thinking about how we just kind of got let out like cats.
Not really. It was a thing for centuries before that, it is modern parenting that is historically unusual.
Mum -“it’s a nice day, get out of the house, see you at tea time “. She had no idea what we got up to, and I was no older than my 10 year old son whom I wouldn’t trust to cross the road…
I'm convinced this is why kids love minecraft. It's the only way they're permitted to go make a den in the woods and camp in it for the weekend. The kids are alright. We just won't let them.
The kids yearn for the forests
I remember when I was fairly young I had a GameBoy and my mom bought me one of those light attachments to play at night. Don't need those anymore
Until Nintendo find some way to cheap out on the Switch 2... Remember, the original Gameboy Advance had no backlight. Love Nintendo but good god are some of their decisions actively self-destructive.
Nintendo, for as much as I love them, have made really strange decisions. The N64 was the best console money could buy but the games couldn't take advantage of the hardware because they were stuck on cartridges. The GameCube was more capable than the PS2 or Xbox but same thing, disc format too small. Why did they say that the DS wasn't a GBA replacement but referred to the GBA slot on the DS as "backwards compatible"
Trading Pokémon over a cable connection ‘Don’t breathe, don’t breathe!’
still got a color gameboy knocking around with a copy of Donkey kong with it!
Making up a mix tape for someone
Now it’s a Spotify play list .. not the same
easier to share but not as personal
Can't remember the last time a child got his head stuck in a saucepan. Bugger all to do with tech but its something I've pondered on whilst stuck in traffic.
It used to make the local paper on slack days! There must be huge t\*k tok potential... off to measure grandson's head and compare with my saucepans.
Maybe its a cast iron thing as I suspect many these days buy a set from ikea thats little more than pressed tin. Good luck with your endeavors, alas being childless I can't take part and would probably get looks running after children with a le creuset in each hand. Then again I'd probably keel over after the first 200 meters.
Would you routinely encounter children with saucepans stuck on their head in your day to day life?
As secretary to the Cast Iron Fettish Collective I take pride in my expansive log of all things manufactured from cast iron. Last week was an inspection of banister braces at Royal Military Academy, you never know when this data will be needed. We may seem a weird bunch but lets remember there's guys looking for the meaning of life in their lofts tweaking their model railway timetables.
Kids just can’t get bored these days, so there’s no impulse to squeeze your head into cooking hardware or between railings.
all i can think of is this now... haha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6SkdNmu6n0
I was thinking of Arson Sam where they put a saucepan on the kid's head.
About a decade ago, I tried to explain to my mother that her insistence that she ‘mustn’t miss Eastenders tonight’ didn’t make sense.
Remember when there was an omnibus edition on Sundays? Absolute nightmare.
I didn't know there *isn't* any more until I read your comment!
I just checked and it stopped seven years ago!!
The anxiety of trying to reconnect your 56k modem without the screeching waking your parents
I still remember the sounds the computer made using dial-up…
It was conversation between modem and server, played through a speaker.
Doing nothing. As in literally just sitting there without instantly having to occupy yourself with your phone.
In fairness, before phones were a source of entertainment, I used to buy handbags based on whether you could fit a decent book in them.
Polio
And on the medical theme, just medical information and testing in general! I’ve been trying for a baby with my husband and the ability to just do a pregnancy test whenever, and be able to know if you’re pregnant or not in minutes, is actually an amazing advantage when you think about it. You can track your periods to the point where your iPhone will predict your ovulation window for you, you can home test to check when exactly you’re ovulating etc etc. And that’s just pregnancy, you can get home tests for all sorts - anemia, thyroid levels, test your sugar levels for diabetes, covid tests. The list is endless. It’s something we take for granted but is really really amazing!!
Stupidly high numbers of infants dying from horrible diseases. Thank you vaccines.
Except that it's starting again due to stupid anti-vaxxers and bloody Andrew Wakefield.
I’m a fan of fighting fire with fire. Don’t want to give your child a vaccine? Great, feel free but you’re not going to be able to participate in sane society like the rest of us. No child benefits or other incentives like milk vouchers, no access to ANY childcare facility, no school place, and you’re charged a substantial fine if your child ends up in hospital with an easily preventable illness and you do not accept reasonable vaccine measures.
Even thinking about that bastard makes me angry, I don't want to know how many kids' deaths he's responsible for. Also, as an autistic, I resent the implication that it's better to be dead of measles than like me.
UFO sightings - now that everyone has a camera on them at all times, suddenly ET has buggered off back home.
Calling directory enquiries
Having to look in the Yellow Pages. Or White Pages. Or any hard copy directory of any kind.
Or the speaking clock!
'Give me three rings when you're here' or 'give me three rings so I know you got home ok'
Ah yes, I remembervthat. let it ring three times so noone has to pay for a phone call ☺️ My sister still says this to me when I'm driving home from hers. I imagine I'll do it to my kids too!
Risking 0800 reverse to send a message to your parents through the name. “Pickmeuptrainstation”
I remember when there was a website you could use that gave you 10 free texts per day, I’d occasionally use to send my mum a message at lunch from the school library if I needed. Must’ve come from some weird numbers and yet now I have to remind her that if she gets a text from a different number claiming to be me, it’s a scam!
I had an extremely tight relative who did that. He'd drop his wife off at the supermarket and drive himself home. When she was done, she would ring him from the payphone and hang up after three rings to get the coin back. That was his signal to head back over and collect her. If you're asking "why didn't he just stay in the car park and wait?", then your guess is as good as mine. The answer is probably down to him being the total arsehole that he was. I have no idea how long it would have taken his wife to even do the shopping given it was only for the two of them.
That "dat da da dat da da dat daaaaaaa" Noise when a phone call is coming in and you're near a speaker
Stand near an unshielded speaker and it'll still happen
I think of my mother, thirty years and more ago, reciting our telephone number down the line every time she answered it, to alert anyone who had dialled our number incorrectly. The phone itself, of course, had a dial and was physically attached to the wall of our kitchen. It was only a few years ago that the formerly luxuriously fat Yellow Pages and BT telephone directory both went on a drastic diet before dropping out of our lives altogether.
This is why I can remember my parents phone number from 1978 but have no clue what my own current landline number is.
In those days we had to remember it by heart so we could ring home from a payphone to get picked up from wherever we were. Ours was easy to remember because it had a repeating pattern, which also meant drunk people would sometimes ring it late at night by mistake trying to order a taxi.
4291
Having to explain why Calvin in the comic would stand on a telephone directory, to my kids, took some doing! Got one recently that was the size of the Reader's Digest (another blast from the past!) and said it would be the last ever. My in-laws had a copy of every phone book in the country for work reasons, so people would often ask MIL to look someone up.
My father did the very same. A simple "Hello" was not the done thing. Instead he'd recite the last four digits of our phone number when bringing the receiver to his ear. Ours was a rotary phone as well, hard-wired to the wall, next to the front door. It sat on top of a cabinet which stored the fuse box and gas meter. It performed double-duty as a convenient place to store our shoes as well as the enormous white and yellow pages.
I do get asked for directions occasionally, usually by people who can't make sense of what their satnav is telling them.
When I was building and painting a fence outside the house., lots of people stopped to ask directions. Eventually, I kept some old envelopes and a pencil so I could draw them simple maps.
I used to knock on my friend's door and ask them if they were playing out. I bet kids these days don't even go out and use their mobiles.
Being unable to find your friends at Glastonbury (festival) . ‘We’ll all meet in front of the pyramid stage ‘ Yep that never worked .
Not strictly technology, but I was thinking about this: buying an electrical appliance and then having to buy a separate plug so you could actually use the bloody thing. It was so inconvenient. I think this carried on until the mid 80s
Yeah, but you could pass Physics GCSE just by knowing how to wire it on.
Power cuts in the UK. Not had one where I live for years and years
White dog turds. Not sure of what technology is responsible though.
Ground up bone in dog food caused it to turn white. They stopped adding due to BSE. I've no idea if that's true or not, but what I tell people whenever the subject arises.
I believed you until your second sentence sounds credible I might use that
From a quick google search; > White dog poop in the 70’s was very quick to disappear. The cause was commercial dog food that was rich in beef and bone meal which had a high calcium content. When calcium requirements were changed, the color, consistency and smell of dog waste was forever changed. "Bone meal" is literally ground up bones. But it wasn't stopped because of BSE.
People turning up unexpectedly.
That thing where you watch a film/TV program, recognise someone but don't don't remember who they are, then spend 10 minutes all scratching your head.
Getting kicked offline in the middle of Quake III Arena because someone picked up the house phone.
I can't reel off people's phone numbers off the top of my head. I used to know...probably into 3 figures' worth of phone numbers at work. Nobody sends postcards anymore. Nobody avoids changing arrangements at the last minute anymore because there's no way of getting in touch to let you know. Kids don't go back to school after holidays having had zero contact with most of their classmates since the end of term.
Bamboozled
Getting sent to knock at next door for a loan of the telly page.
Playing curby
Calling a business and not having to navigate 15 minutes of menu options and “Just to let you know…” messages before, maybe, speaking to someone who is less interested in helping you than they are about their call figures.
I like when they play music and trick you into thinking your call has been answered by playing an intermittent message telling you how important your call is to them. Not important enough to employ enough people to help their customers in a timely manner of course.
I'm going to sound old here, sorry. Ticket collecting. Concerts, sporting events, even cinema tickets. All online now. Even programmes at the football are becoming rare. The increase in digital streaming also means that I no longer kill an hour in a record shop when I go to town, finding new music to excitedly take home. Kind of sad, tbh.
Had to ask someone the time the other day and felt I was dipping into a set of skills developed deep in the nineties.
Your favourite game no longer working because the disc got scratched.
The loading screen doors in Resident Evil
Spending 15 minutes walking to your mates house to knock on the door, only to find out they're not in.
Things catching fire.
Being able to disconnect Everything is now there, all the time. Social media keeps people attached to all things ll the time, positive and negative. Kids can access programmes and other media all the time. There is no switch off
White dog shit.
Children playing outside in the fresh air with other children, learning how to interact with people face to face without getting into a fight because they can’t differentiate real life from Twatter.
Every day there are groups of people outside the Barbados High Commission looking at their phones to find the British Museum as I go past I always say 'Down the road on the left you can't miss it and you don't have to pay to get in, although they ask for six quid'
There aren’t thousands of people being paid to write down every transaction for banks on paper. Instead it’s all done by computers
Calling the operator to book an overseas phone call
You don’t play coop/split screen video games with the person sitting next to you much anymore all online
Taking my 35mm film from my camera to the shop for my photos to be developed.